


The Right Amount of Dingy

by Lastly



Category: Mass Effect Trilogy
Genre: Angst, F/F, Female Shepard/Liara (implied), post-ME2
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-01-31
Updated: 2019-01-31
Packaged: 2019-10-19 17:51:05
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,074
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17606060
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Lastly/pseuds/Lastly
Summary: Not everyone is around to celebrate defeating the Collectors and not everyone that is around wants to celebrate.





	The Right Amount of Dingy

"Shouldn't you be at the party? I don't know if you've heard but we're big damn heroes now that the Collectors are dealt with." Miranda looked up from her glass of whiskey to see Commander Shepard standing in the doorway of her office.

"Shouldn't _you_ be at the party, Commander? You're the biggest damnedest hero of us all, aren't you?" Miranda had intended for it to sound sarcastic but the alcohol had envenomed her words a bit more than what she intended.

"Do you have something you want to talk about Miranda?" Shepard sat down in the chair across from Miranda's desk without waiting for an answer, clearly intent on hearing about Miranda's problems whether she wanted to talk or not.

"No ma'am. Everything's fine." Although she was used to lying, she felt the need to look away from Shepard when trying to get away with such a blatant and obvious lie like that. The two sat in silence for a moment; Miranda wanting to avoid a discussion and Shepard hoping that Miranda might start it on her own. 

"I know she was important to you." Miranda suddenly perked up. Shepard shouldn't know. _No one_ should know. They had done everything they could to keep it a secret. 

"I... don't know what you're talking about." Miranda's eyes searched the room for anything to look at other than Shepard.

"EDI told me about you and Jack-"

"You _spied_ on us?" Miranda slammed her half-empty glass on her desk and her gaze suddenly locked on to Shepard.

"It's not like that, calm down." Shepard let out a sigh. "I asked EDI to keep an eye on the crew and tell me if anything came up and she misunderstood that. Once she told me about you two I told her to stop it and she did. I never wanted to spy on my own crew, I just wanted to be there for people if they needed it." Miranda could tell by the change in Shepard's tone that she really was sorry about it. She poured some more whiskey into her glass while she tried to figure out what to say next. After a moment she decided that since the cat was out of the bag then she may as well just come clean about it.

"Well... how much do you know? What all did EDI tell you about?"

"She told me about a time that you two were in the observation deck, yelling and screaming at each other about Cerberus... and about how it was all a cover so you two could get a little time to yourselves." Miranda let out a little chuckle at the memory.

"Yeah... we did that a few times. At first the yelling and arguing was real. That was back when the sex was _really_ angry. Eventually the yelling was fake and the sex was... less angry." A small smirk found its way to the corner of Miranda's mouth.

"You two didn't need to hide it, it's not like relationships are against regulations or anything."

"Yeah, we knew that. You and Liara set a pretty clear example of that." Shepard couldn't help but smile and laugh a bit since she hadn't been expecting to get dragged in the middle of this conversation. After a pause, Miranda continued. "Jack wanted to keep it a secret. I think she didn't want the rest of the crew thinking she had gone soft or something. Didn't want people knowing that she had started dating the cheerleader..." The last few words crept out of Miranda slowly as her eyes got glassy with some tears. She wiped at one of her eyes in hopes of staving off the tears for a while longer and finished off the whiskey in her glass. When she reached for the bottle, Shepard put a hand on it as a silent suggestion that she should, at the very least, slow down some.

"We only had to do that when we were off-world though." Miranda's voice was starting to get a bit shaky but she kept going. "Whenever we docked somewhere, Jack would have me book a hotel room under a fake name and we'd sneak off separately and meet up there. I was more than happy to keep it all a secret... it was actually pretty fun to do. It was what Jack wanted and... well I wouldn't say it made her happy because I'm honestly not sure anything really could have done that... but it at least made her less unhappy, for what it's worth."

"I... really wish we could've gone on more actual dates... I found this little restaurant on Omega that I wanted to take her to. It was in a rare sweet spot where it was dingy enough for her tastes but not too dingy for mine." Shepard reaching across the desk and gave Miranda's hand a supportive squeeze as some tears started to sneak their way down her cheeks. 

Miranda opened her mouth but it took some time for more words to come out. "...I really miss her Shepard..." she said in barely more than a whisper.

"I would say we all miss her but I think we both know that's not true." Shepard's remark elicited a few laughs from Miranda. She wasn't wrong, more than a few people on the Normandy's crew didn't care for Jack even if all of Shepard's inner circle did seem to. A silence fell over the pair once again, the only sounds in the room being the constant humming of the Normandy and Miranda fiddling with her glass, slowly spinning it on her desk.

"The memorial is tomorrow morning. After that we'll all get drunk again." Shepard broke the silence, unsure of what else to say. Despite her desire to, she had never actually been very good at comforting people especially when it was about a recently-deceased lover.

"If we want to give her proper memorial, we should find some shit to break. Preferably some Cerberus shit." Shepard smirked at her.

"Liara's way ahead of you on that one. She sent us a list of Cerberus facilities we could hit, so I was thinking we might go on a little tour and hit all of them. What do you think about that?" A real and genuine smile found its way onto Miranda's face as she wiped away the tears.

"As long as I can get first dibs of blowing up something big."

**Author's Note:**

> I only recently started reading fics of them, but Jackanda is a very good ship. In my playthrough of ME2, Jack was the only one who died in the finale and I was sad but I was committed to not save-scumming so that just had to be canon to me so I guess anything I write for them will probably be sad!


End file.
